Morven Gregor on Veronica Ryan's The Weather Inside II – 'Bringing her into this more history-laden domestic environment is very exciting'
The Turner Prize-winning sculptor brings intimate domestic histories, textiles and modernist forms to the grand interiors of Mount Stuart
Morven Gregor is talking from Venice where she’s installing Bugarin + Castle’s Scottish commission for the city’s Biennale. But in her role as curator of contemporary art at Mount Stuart, she’s thrilled about the next major show at the Isle Of Bute mansion, Veronica Ryan’s The Weather Inside II. ‘Veronica’s got a big exhibition on at Whitechapel Gallery at the moment, so bringing her into this more history-laden domestic environment is very exciting,’ says Gregor.
Ryan is a Montserrat-born British sculptor known for her work recontextualising traditionally domestic and feminine objects and processes. Seed heads and pods play a talismanic but ambiguous role in her art, signifying birth and protection as much as confinement and containment, often reproduced on a large scale in materials such as brass and ceramics. Recently, Ryan’s practice has incorporated ephemera and found materials to a greater extent. Part of a modernist heritage stretching back to Eva Hesse and Barbara Hepworth, Ryan’s oeuvre is ineluctably tied to questions of race (and thus to a critique of 20th-century modernism’s whiteness) but never reducible to them.
The 2022 Turner Prize winner has also often worked with fabric and textiles. As Gregor says, ‘those traditional female crafts are going to be crucial to this show, as is the notion of the house being a family space’ (Mount Stuart is home to the Crichton-Stuart family, the Marquesses Of Bute). Offering a tantalising glimpse of what will be on show, Ryan herself states that The Weather Inside II explores ‘interior lives’, including ‘cabinets with decorative items, family photos on a different scale’, and ‘histories of life, death and the in-between’.
Veronica Ryan: The Weather Inside II, Mount Stuart, Isle Of Bute, Saturday 30 May–Sunday 18 October.